Summary: Amidst the long-overdue reckoning with systemic racism in the US and globally, an area of study that focuses on the lives of Black people and seeks to more fully share a totality of Black experience has gained increased attention. In this episode, SIS professor Jordanna Matlon joins Big World to discuss her research on one of these areas: Black masculinity. Matlon explains why individual Black men who garner great wealth or celebrity status become performing commodities in popular culture (1:53). She also describes her fieldwork in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, where she found that global media depictions of Black American artists have impacted how Abidjan street vendors view their roles as men (5:28). The patriarchal idea that the sole measure of a man is his capacity to earn money—the wage earner ideal—is not specific to any one country. Matlon breaks down how this idea impacts Black men across the African diaspora worldwide (10:07) and shares why she uses scare quotes when describing a “crisis” of Black masculinity (15:33). In a nod to the unusual life of an enthnographer as compared to other academics, Matlon reveals what was it like to record two songs with a former street vendor and her research assistants while she was in Abidjan (17:16). Finally, the year 2020 spurred a level of activism not seen in the US in decades. This activism mostly was aimed at redressing the country’s systemic racism. Looking forward, Matlon shares what she thinks success looks like for this generation of activists (21:06). During our “Take Five” segment, Matlon states what five things she would do to disassociate Black masculinity from “crisis” (13:35), once and for all.
